Tick Tock (18 page)

The homes along the harbour were set close together on narrow lots, because the land on which they stood was enormously valuable. To preserve the multimillion dollar views, the property lines between neighbours' patios and backyards were delineated neither by high walls nor by dense masses of foliage, but by low shrubs, or planter boxes, or fences only two to three feet high.

Scootie bounded over a foot-high planter wall that overflowed with vine geraniums. Del and Tommy followed him onto the brick patio of the neighbouring Cape Cod-style house.

A security lamp on the nearby dock revealed cushion-less teak outdoor furniture left to weather through the winter, terra-cotta pots full of stalk primrose, and a massive built-in barbecue centre now covered with a tailored vinyl rain shield.

They leaped over a low plum-thorn hedge that delineated another property line, squished through a muddy flower bed, crossed another patio behind a stone and mahogany house that seemed inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, and clambered over more plum-thorn that snagged at the legs of Tommy's jeans, pricked through his socks to puncture the skin at his ankles.

As they headed west along the peninsula, sprinting past the back of a brooding Spanish colonial home with deep balconies on three levels, a formidable dog penned in a narrow run between houses began to bark savagely at them and throw itself against a restraining gate. The hound sounded as eager to rend and kill as any German shepherd or Doberman ever trained by the Gestapo's. Ahead, still more barking arose from other dogs anticipating their approach.

Tommy didn't dare look back, for fear that the Samaritan was at his heels. In his mind's eye, he could see five fat fingers, as pale and cold as those of a corpse, reaching toward him, inches from the nape of his neck.

Behind a three-story ultramodern house that was all angled glass and polished-limestone cladding, blinding banks of floodlights came on, evidently triggered by motion detectors in a security system that was more aggressive than anything protecting the other houses. The shock of this sudden glare caused Tommy to stumble, but he kept his balance and maintained his grip on the shotgun. Gasping for breath, he plunged forward, with Del, across a massive cast-stone balustrade onto the unlighted patio of a Mediterranean-style house, where a TV glowed in the family room and where a startled old man peered out at them as they raced past.

The night seemed to be filled with uncountable barking dogs, all close but out of sight, as though they were falling with the rain, coming down through the black sky, soon to land in packs on all sides.

Three houses beyond the ultramodern pile with the floodlamps, the beam of a big flashlight suddenly speared out of the darkness and the rain, fixing on Del.

The man behind the light shouted, “Stop right there!”

Without any cry of warning, another guy erupted from the gloom and blindsided Tommy, as if they were professional football players and this were the Superbowl.

They both skidded and went down on the slick concrete decking, and Tommy landed so hard that his breath was knocked out of him. He rolled into some patio chairs that tumbled over with a tubular-steel ringing. Stars swarmed behind his eyes, and he cracked his left elbow squarely on the ulnar nerve—the ill-named funny bone—sending a disabling painful tingle the length of his arm.

To the man with the flashlight, Del Payne said, “Back off, you asshole, I've got a gun, back off, back off!”

Tommy realized that he had dropped the Mossberg. In spite of the numbing pain in his left arm, wheezing noisily as he struggled to get some air into his lungs, he pushed onto his hands and knees. He was desperate to find the weapon.

The foolhardy tackler was sprawled facedown, groaning, apparently in even worse shape than Tommy. As far as Tommy was concerned, the stupid son of a bitch deserved to have a broken leg, two broken legs, and maybe a skull fracture for good measure. At first he had assumed that the men were cops, but they hadn't identified themselves as policemen, and now he realized that they evidently lived here and fancied themselves to be natural-born heroes ready to take on a pair of fleeing burglars.

As Tommy crawled past the groaning man, he heard Del say, “Get that damn light out of my eyes right now, or I'll shoot it out and take you with it.”

The other would-be hero's courage wavered, and so did his flashlight.

By a stroke of luck, the nervous beam quivered across the patio, revealing the shotgun.

Tommy crawled to the Mossberg.

The man who'd tackled him had managed to sit up. He was spitting out something—possibly teeth—and cursing.

Clutching at another patio table, Tommy pulled himself to his feet just as Scootie began to bark loudly, urgently.

Tommy glanced to the east and saw the fat man two properties away, silhouetted against the bright backdrop of the floodlamps at the ultramodern house. As the Samaritan raced toward them, leaping a low fence into the property next door, he was no longer the least bit clumsy but as graceful as a panther in spite of his size, his raincoat billowing like a cape behind him.

Snarling fiercely, Scootie moved to intercept the fat man.

“Scootie, no!” Del shouted.

Assuming a shooter's stance as naturally as if she had been born with a gun in her hands, she opened fire with the Desert Eagle when the Samaritan cleared a hedge and splashed onto this patio, where they were apparently going to be forced to make their last stand. She squeezed off three rounds with what seemed to be calm deliberation. The evenly timed explosions were so thunderous that Tommy thought the recoil of the powerful handgun would knock her flat, but she stood tall.

She was an excellent shot, and all three rounds appeared to hit their target. With the first
boom,
the Samaritan stopped as if he'd run head-on into a brick wall, and with the second
boom,
he was half lifted off his feet and sent staggering backward, and with the third, he spun and swayed and almost fell.

The hero with the flashlight had thrown it aside and had fallen to the deck to get out of the line of fire.

The tooth-spitter was still sitting on the puddled concrete, legs splayed in an infantile posture, hands clasped to his head. He was apparently frozen in terror.

Edging away from the patio table, toward Del and Scootie, Tommy remained riveted by the wounded Samaritan who was turned half away from them, who had taken three rounds from the .44 Magnum, who swayed but did not drop, did not drop.

Did. Not. Drop.

The hood was no longer over the fat man's head, but the darkness still masked the side of his face. Then he slowly turned toward Tommy and Del, and though his features remained obscure, his extraordinary eyes fixed on them and on the growling Labrador. They were radiant, green, inhuman eyes.

Scootie's growl degenerated into a whimper, and Tommy knew exactly how he felt.

With admirable calm, made of sterner stuff than either Tommy or Scootie, Del squeezed off shot after shot with the Desert Eagle. The explosions crashed across the harbour and echoed off the far shore, and they were still echoing back and forth after she had emptied the magazine.

Every round appeared to hit the fat man, because he jerked, twitched, doubled over but then snapped upright as if in response to the impact of another slug, executed a limb-flapping marionette-like spin, and at last went down. He landed on one side, knees drawn up in the foetal position, and the frosty beam of the would-be hero's flashlight, which lay discarded on the patio, illuminated one of the Samaritan's white, thick-fingered hands. He seemed to be dead, but certainly was not.

“Let's get out of here,” Del said.

Scootie was already leaping across a hedge, into the backyard of the next house to the west.

The roar of the .44 Magnum had been so daunting that most of the barking dogs along the harbour had fallen silent, no longer eager to escape their pens.

In the silvery beam of the flashlight, the Samaritan's plump white hand lay cupped, palm up, filling with rain. Then it spasmed, and the pale flesh grew mottled and dark.

“Oh, shit,” Tommy said.

Impossibly, the fingers metamorphosed into spatulate tentacles and then into spiky insectile digits with wicked chitinous hooks at each knuckle.

The entire shadowed mass of the fallen Samaritan seemed to be shifting, pulsating. Changing.

“Seen enough, outta here,” Del declared, and she hurried after Scootie.

Tommy searched for the courage to approach the creature and fire the shotgun pointblank into its brain. By the time that he could reach the beast, however, it might have transformed itself so radically that it would have nothing that was recognizably a head. Besides, intuitively he knew that no number of rounds from the Mossberg—or any other gun—would destroy it.

“Tommy!”
Del called frantically from the patio of the house next door.

“Run, get out of here,” Tommy advised the homeowner who was prone on the concrete deck.

The man seemed traumatized by all the gunfire, confused. He started to push on to his knees, but then he must have glimpsed the shotgun, because he pleaded, “No, don't, Jesus, don't,” and pressed flat to the deck again.

“Run, for God's sake, run, before it recovers from the shots,” Tommy urged the second man, the tooth-spitter, who continued to sit in a daze. “Please, run.”

Heeding his own advice, he followed Del, grateful that he had not broken a leg when he'd been tackled.

In the distance, a siren wailed.

When Tommy, Del, and the dog were two properties away from the scene of the confrontation, one of the would-be heroes screamed in the night behind them.

Tommy skidded to a halt on a slate patio at a Tudor house and looked toward the cries.

Not much could be seen in the rain and murk. Shadows thrashed against the backdrop of security lights from the ultramodern house farther east. Some were decidedly strange shadows, huge and quick, jagged and jittering, but he would have been indulging his fevered imagination if he had claimed to see a monster in the night.

Now two men were screaming. Terrible screams. Blood-freezing. They shrieked as though they were being wrenched limb from limb, slit open, torn apart.

The demon would allow no witnesses.

Perhaps a sound reached Tommy of which he was only subliminally aware, a voracious chewing, or perhaps some quality of the two men's soul-curdling screams spoke to him on a primitive level and inspired racial memories of a prehistoric age when human beings had been easy prey to larger beasts, but somehow he knew that they were not merely being slaughtered; they were being devoured.

When the police arrived, they might not find much left of the victims on that patio. Perhaps nothing other than a little blood—and not even blood after a few more minutes of cleansing rain. The two men would seem to have vanished.

Tommy's stomach twisted with nausea.

If his arm hadn't still been tingling from the blow to his funny bone, if his muscles and joints hadn't ached from the fall and burned with fatigue, if he had not been shivering from the cold, he might have thought that he was in a nightmare. But he was suffering enough discomfort and pain that he had no need to pinch himself to determine if he were awake.

More than one siren cleaved the night, and they were rapidly drawing nearer.

Scootie ran, Del ran, Tommy ran once more, as one of the men stopped screaming, stopped being
able
to scream, and then the second man's cries choked off as well, and not a single dog was barking any more, all silenced by the scent of something otherworldly, while the harbour gradually filled with an incoming tide and the earth rotated inexorably toward dawn.

SIX

Under the roof of the silent and unmoving carousel among the herd of colourful horses frozen in mid-gallop, Tommy and Del found a two-person chariot with carved eagles on the sides. They were glad to be out of the rain and to have a chance, however brief, to rest.

Ordinarily the perimeter of the carousel was covered when it was not in use, but this night it stood open to the elements.

Scootie quietly prowled among the horses, circling the elevated platform, apparently on sentry duty, ready to warn them if the demon approached in either its Samaritan guise or any other.

The Balboa Fun Zone, arguably the heart of the peninsula's important tourist business, extended for a few blocks along Edgewater Avenue, a pedestrian mall that did not admit vehicular traffic west of Main Street. Numerous gift shops, Pizza Pete's, ice-cream stands, restaurants, Balboa Saloon, arcades offering video games and pinball and skee-ball, boat-rental operations, bumper cars, a Ferris wheel, the carousel on which Tommy and Del sat, Lazer Tag, docks for various companies offering guided-tour cruises, and other diversions lined Edgewater, with views of the dazzling harbour and its islands to be glimpsed between the attractions on the north side.

In spring, summer, and autumn—or on any warm day in the winter—tourists and sun lovers strolled this promenade, taking a break from the Pacific surf and from the beaches on the opposite side of the narrow peninsula. Newlyweds, elderly couples, spectacular-looking young women in bikinis, lean and tanned young men in shorts, and children walked-skated-rollerbladed among veterans in wheelchairs and babies in strollers, enjoying the glitter of sunlight on water, eating ice cream cones, roasted corn from Kountry Corn, popsicles, cookies. Laughter and happy chatter mingled with the music from the carousel, the putter of boat engines, and the ceaseless ring-beep-pong-bop from the game arcades.

At two-thirty, on this stormy November morning, the Fun Zone was deserted. The only sounds were those made by the rain as it drummed hollowly on the carousel roof, pinged off the brass poles on the outer circle of horses, snapped against festoons of limp vinyl pennants, and drizzled through the fronds of the queen palms along the harbour side of the promenade. This was a lonely music, the forlorn and tuneless anthem of desolation.

The shops and other attractions were shuttered and dark but for an occasional security lantern. On summer evenings, when augmented by the neon and the sparkling Tivoli lights of the arcades and rides, the old bronze lampposts with frosted-glass globes—some round, most in the form of urns with finials—provided an appealing and romantic glow; then everything glimmered, including the great mirror that was the harbour, and the world was scintillant, effervescent. But now the lamplight was strangely bleak, cold, too feeble to prevent the crushing weight of the November night from pressing low over the Fun Zone.

Extracting a shotgun shell from a pocket in her ski jacket, Del spoke in a murmur that would not carry beyond the carousel: “Here. You only fired one round, I think.”

“Yeah,” Tommy said, matching her soft tone.

“Keep it fully loaded.”

“Those poor damn guys,” he lamented as he slid the shell into the magazine tube on the Mossberg. “What horrible deaths.”

“It's not your fault,” she said.

“They wouldn't have been there, the
thing
wouldn't have been there, if
I
hadn't been there.”

“It's upsetting,” she agreed. “But you were only trying to stay alive, running for your life, and they stepped in.”

“Still.”

“Obviously, they were marked for an unnatural extraction.”

“Extraction?”

“From this world. If the thing in the fat man hadn't gotten them, then they would have been taken in some other unusual way. Like spontaneous combustion. Or an encounter with a lycanthrope.”

“Lycanthrope? Werewolf?” He wasn't able to deal with her weirdness just now, so he changed the subject. “Where the hell did you learn to shoot like that? Your mother again?”

“Daddy. He taught Mom and me, wanted us to be prepared for anything. Pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns. I can handle an Uzi as if I was born with it, and—”

“Uzi?”

“Yeah. And when it comes to—”

“Submachine guns?”

“—when it comes to knife throwing—”

“Knife
throwing?” Tommy said, and realized that he had raised his voice.

“—I'm good enough to put together a stage act and make a living with it in Vegas or even the circus, if I ever had to,” Del continued in a murmur as she unzipped another pocket and took from it a handful of cartridges for the Desert Eagle. “Unfortunately, I'm not half as good at fencing as I'd like to be, though I'll admit to being first-rate with a crossbow.”

“He died when you were ten,” Tommy said. “So he taught you all this when you were just a little kid?”

“Yeah. We'd go out in the desert near Vegas and blow the crap out of empty soda bottles, tin cans, posters of old movie monsters like Dracula and the creature from the Black Lagoon. It was a lot of fun.”

“What in the name of God was he preparing you for?”

“Dating.”

“Dating?”

“That was his joke. Actually he was preparing me for the unusual life he knew I was going to have.”

“How could he know?”

Rather than answer the question, Del said, “But the truth is, because of the training Daddy gave me, I've never been on a date with any guy who intimidated me, never had a problem.”

“I guess not. I think you'd have to be dating Hannibal Lecter before you'd feel uneasy.”

Pressing the last two rounds into the .44 magazine, she said, “I still miss Daddy. He truly understood me—and not many people ever do.”

“I'm trying,” Tommy assured her.

Passing by on his sentry duties, Scootie came to Del, put his head in her lap, and whimpered as though he had heard the regret and the sense of loss in her voice.

Tommy said, “How could a little girl hold and fire a gun like that? The recoil—”

“Oh, of course, we started with an air rifle, an air pistol, and then a .22,” she said, slamming the loaded magazine into the Israeli pistol. “When we practiced with rifles or shotguns, Daddy padded my shoulders, crouched behind to brace me, and held the gun with me. He was only familiarizing me with the more powerful weapons, so I'd feel comfortable with them from an early age, wouldn't be afraid of them when the time came to actually handle them. He died before I
really
got good with the bigger stuff, and then Mom continued the lessons.”

“Too bad he never got around to teaching you how to make bombs,” Tommy said with mock dismay.

“I'm comfortable with dynamite and most plastic explosives, but they really aren't particularly useful for self-defence.”

“Was your father a terrorist?”

“Furthest thing from it. He thought all politics were stupid. He was a gentle man.”

“But he just usually had some dynamite laying around to practice making bombs.”

“Not usually.”

“Just at Christmas, huh?”

“Basically, I learned explosives not to make bombs but to disarm them if I had to.”

“A task we're all faced with every month or so.”

“No,” she said, “I've only had to do it twice.” Tommy wanted to believe that she was kidding, but he decided not to ask. His brain was overloaded with new discoveries about her, and in his current weariness, he did not have the energy or the mental capacity to contemplate more of her disconcerting revelations. “And I thought
my
family was strange.”

“Everyone thinks his family is strange,” Del said, scratching Scootie behind the ears, “but it's just that, because we're closer to the people we love, we tend to see them through a magnifying glass, through a thicker lens of emotion, and we exaggerate their eccentricities.”

“Not in the case of
your
family,” he said. “Magnifying glass or no magnifying glass, it's a strange clan.”

Scootie returned to his patrol, padding quietly away through the motionless stampede of wooden horses.

As Del zipped shut the pocket from which she had taken the ammunition, she said, “The way I see it, your family might have a prejudice against blondes, but when they see how much I've got to offer, they'll learn to like me.”

Grateful that she couldn't see him blush in this gloom, Tommy said, “Never mind expertise with guns. Can you cook? That's a big deal in my family.”

“Ah, yes, the family of fighting bakers. Well, I've picked up a lot from my folks. Daddy won several prizes in chilli-cooking contests all across Texas and the Southwest, and Mom graduated from Cordon Bleu.”

“Was that
while
she was a ballerina?”

“Right after.”

He checked his watch—2:37. “Maybe we better get moving again.”

Another siren rose in the distance.

Del listened long enough to be sure that the siren was drawing nearer rather than receding. “Let's wait a while. We're going to have to find new wheels and hit the road again, but I don't want to be hot-wiring a car when the streets around here are crawling with cops.”

“If we stay too long in one place—”

“We're okay for a while. You sleepy?”

“Couldn't sleep if I tried.”

“Eyes itchy and burning?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I'll be okay.”

“Your neck aches so bad you can hardly hold up your head,” she said, as if she could feel his discomfort.

“I'm alert enough. Don't worry about me,” he said, and with one hand he squeezed the nape of his neck as if he could pull the pain out of his flesh.

She said, “You're weary to the bone, poor baby. Turn away from me a little. Let me work on you.”

“Work on me?”

“Move your butt a little, tofu boy, come on,” she said, nudging him with her hip.

The chariot was narrow, but he was able to turn enough to allow her to massage his shoulders and the back of his neck. Her slender hands were surprisingly strong, but though she pressed hard at times, she relieved rather than caused pain.

Sighing, he said, “Who taught you this?”

“It's just a thing I know. Like my painting.”

They were both quiet for minute, except for Tommy's occasional groan as Del's fingers found another coil of tension and slowly unwound it.

The diligent Scootie passed, out at the edge of the platform, as black as the night itself and as silent as a spirit.

As she worked her thumbs up and down the nape of Tommy's neck, Del said, “Have you ever been abducted by aliens?”

“Oh, boy.”

“What?”

“Here we go again.”

“You mean you
have?”

“Been abducted? Of course not. I mean, here
you
go again, getting weird.”

“You don't believe in extraterrestrial intelligences?”

“I believe the universe is so big that there's got to be lots of other intelligent species in it.”

“So what's weird?”

“But I
don't
believe they come all the way across the galaxy to kidnap people and take them up in flying saucers and examine their genitals.”

“They don't just examine the genitals.”

“I know, I know. Sometimes they take the abductee to Chicago for beer and pizza.”

She lightly, chastisingly slapped the back of his head. “You're being sarcastic.”

“A little.”

“It's not becoming to you.”

“Listen, an alien species, vastly more intelligent than we are, creatures millions of years more evolved than we are, probably wouldn't have any interest in us at all—and certainly wouldn't be interested enough to spend so much manpower harassing a bunch of ordinary citizens.”

Massaging his scalp now, Del said, “Personally, I believe in alien abductions.”

“I am not surprised.”

“I believe they're worried about us.”

“The aliens?”

“That's right.”

“Why would they be worried about us?”

“We're such a troubled species, so confused, self-destructive. I think the aliens want to help us achieve enlightenment.”

“By examining our genitals? Then those guys sitting ringside at nude-dancing clubs only want to help the girls on the stage to achieve enlightenment.”

From behind him, she reached around to his forehead, drawing light circles on his brow with her fingers. “You're such a wise guy.”

“I write detective novels.”

“Maybe you've even been abducted,” she said.

“Not me.”

“You wouldn't remember.”

“I'd remember,” he assured her.

“Not if the aliens didn't want you to.”

“Just a wild shot in the dark here—but I bet you think you've been abducted.”

She stopped massaging his brow and pulled him around to face her again. Her murmur fell to a conspiratorial whisper: “What if I told you there are a few nights when I've had missing hours, blank spots, where I just seem to have blacked out, gone into a fugue state or something. All abductees report these missing hours, these holes in their memories where their abduction experiences have been erased or suppressed.”

“Del, dear sweet loopy Del, please don't be offended, please understand that I say this with affection: I wouldn't be surprised to hear that you had a couple of these missing hours every day of the week.”

Puzzled, she said, “Why would I be offended?”

“Never mind.”

“Anyway, I don't have them every day of the week—only one or two days a year.”

“What about ghosts?” he asked.

“What about them?”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“I've even met a few,” she said brightly. “What about the healing power of crystals?” She shook her head. “They can't heal, but they
can
focus your psychic power.”

“Out-of-body experiences?”

“I'm sure it can be done, but I like my body too much to want to leave it even for a short time.”

“Remote viewing?”

“That's easy. Pick a town.”

“What?”

“Name a town.”

“Fresno,” he said.

With bubbly confidence, she said, “I could describe any room in any building in Fresno—where I've never been in my life, by the way—and if we drove up there tomorrow, you'd see it was just like I said.”